Danish esports organization Astralis has announced the launch of their new talent development initiative through a blog post on their official website.
As mentioned in the post, the new initiative named ’Astralis Talent’ is “designed to create a recruitment platform and training partner for the A teams, as well as contributing to the development of young talent in a professional setting.”
This new development program will operate out of the Copenhagen Headquarters of the org and will focus on games like CSGO and League of Legends.
CEO of Astralis Anders Hørsholt has claimed that they have invested significantly in creating ideal conditions for players to practice and progress in to help it become a possible recruitment platform for the org’s A teams in the future.
By introducing ‘Astralis Talent’, we invite local talent to be a part of our set-up and culture with the ambition to integrate young players into a healthy, competitive environment, introducing them to the life of a true professional.
Astralis Talent is an investment in the future as a possible recruitment platform for our A teams, as well as inhouse training for all players. It is a way for us to secure an even better connection to the local ecosystem and over time, we hope to elevate players into our A teams. This will not happen overnight, though, and we are going to work with the set-up and fine tune the processes over the coming months.
Over time, the Astralis Talent set-up will enable the A-players to stay competitive when not playing for the A team, while letting a selected group of ambitious youngsters take full advantage of being a part of a top professional organization, competing together with far more experienced players.
Anders Hørsholt, CEO, Astralis
Ever since we started, we have had discussions around how to implement talent development into our overall strategy without compromising in other areas. We finally feel, we have the resources and facilities and we have gained a lot of experience, which we obviously did not have when starting out.
Our new A team coaches in League of Legends have brought a lot of experience and ideas and together with zonic, performance manager Lars Robl and the three new talent coaches, we will have an extremely strong group around the teams.
The Astralis Talent set-up is a talent education programme with full access to Astralis Group’s facilities and organization, aimed at integrating the talents into the performance culture of Astralis. For a start, we will most likely have 1-2 players on each team who are older and more experienced, but we aim to work mainly with 14/15-20 years old players. We will include their parents to the degree needed, and we will insist the players continue with school and education.
In year one, we will have a total of 3 teams in League of Legends. In 2021, the A team and the Talent team will be working out of the Copenhagen HQ, while the Academy team will still be working and playing in the Spanish second division. In Counter-Strike, both the A team and talents will be working and playing out of Copenhagen and the talent team will compete in relevant regional tournaments.
It is a move for the future, and it will take time for us to implement the full set-up. Initially, we consider these separate rosters from the A-teams and it will not affect the A team roster size in Counter-Strike. However, over time, it is a clear ambition to fully integrate Astralis Talent into the overall performance and player development strategy, Hvidt explains.
Talent teams and rosters in both League of Legends and Counter-Strike will be finalized by early January at the latest
Kasper Hvidt, Director of Sports, Astralis.
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